ations of the new faith but exercises in settling religious disagreements. In addition to the break with Judaism and the challenge to pagan hegemony, which defined Christianity as a historical movement, there was within Christianity a host of competing interpretations of the meaning of Jesus' life, death, and thought. The Gnostics seem to have been of particular concern to the orthodox Christians. Gnosticism emerged as a sectarian spiritual movement that was both parallel to and in an important sense competitive with the movement that was eventually to be defined as orthodox Roman Catholicism. Authorities assign the growth and challenge of Gnosticism as a type of religious alternative to orthodoxy mainly to the second century A.D./C.E. (Pagels passim; Green 109). There is a view that as a sociological phenomenon Gnosticism may have been sectarian in nature, but its texts are evidence of a relatively coherent attempt to institutionalize the legitimacy of its doctrines by means of standard forms of worship, despite the lack of a formal organizational struct
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